Striving for Independence: Two-Year Impact Findings from the Youth Villages Transitional Living Evaluation

Abstract

Large numbers of young people in the United States were in foster care or in juvenile justice custody as teenagers, and many of them have a difficult time making a successful transition to independent adulthood as they leave these systems. Most of them faced a number of disadvantages during childhood and often have poor outcomes across several domains relative to their peers as they become adults. While government funding to help these groups has increased, few of the programs that have been rigorously evaluated have been found to improve outcomes. To advance knowledge in this area, the Youth Villages program sought an independent evaluation of its Transitional Living program--now known as "YVLifeSet"--which is one example of an "independent living" program. The Transitional Living program aims to help young men and women make the transition to adulthood by providing intensive, individualized, and clinically focused case management, support, and counseling. The evaluation used a rigorous random assignment design in which study sample members were assigned at random to either a program group that was offered the Transitional Living program services or to a control group that was not offered those services. This third major report in the evaluation builds on the one-year findings and assesses the estimated two-year impacts of the Transitional Living program using administrative data for three outcome domains: education, employment and earnings, and criminal involvement. The report also presents information on the costs of operating the Transitional Living program. Key findings overall and from the two-year analysis include: (1) Transitional Living did not increase young people's average earnings during the second year of follow-up, but it had a modest, positive effect at some earnings levels during this time period and it led to modest increases in employment and earnings over the full two-year study period; (2) Statistically significant effects were not observed in Year 1 in the education, social support, and criminal involvement domains, and did not emerge in Year 2 (though social support was measured in Year 1 only); and (3) The program increased housing stability and economic well-being and improved some of the primary outcomes related to health and safety in Year 1, but data were not available to assess whether impacts in these domains continued into Year 2. The following is appended: Impacts by Subgroups of Young People. Contains a list of earlier MDRC Publications on the Youth Villages Transitional Living Evaluation. [For the first report, see "Moving into Adulthood: Implementation Findings from the Youth Villages Transitional Living Evaluation" (ED545451); for the second report, see "Becoming Adults: One-Year Impact Findings from the Youth Villages Transitional Living Evaluation" (ED558489); and for the policy brief, see "After Foster Care and Juvenile Justice: A Preview of the Youth Villages Transitional Living Evaluation. Policy Brief" (ED531545).]